High Level Tracker 2 v2.0.3

HLT 2 (High Level Tracker 2) shows where the working day went and lets you answer "how is it going?" in ten seconds. It works hand in hand with Jira and Telegram: you log time once, in Jira, as you always do, and your worklogs, meetings, notes and review files arrive in the journal on their own. You only type in what lives in neither place: a hallway conversation, a promise, an idea. Whatever is left open piles up in Tails instead of getting lost.

Your Jira time comes in by itself

Every worklog of yours becomes a task record on its day: the issue key and title, the start time, the minutes logged, the worklog comment and a link to the issue. The record is already marked done - the work happened, so it never hangs around as a tail.

• Nothing is typed twice: log 1h 30m on an issue and the record shows up on that day.
• Changes in Jira follow: edit a worklog and the record updates, delete it and the record is cancelled and stops counting.
• Your own edits to a record stay until Jira changes that same field.
• The issue key opens the issue's history - every day you worked on it, with the total time.
• Time is filed into the right project of your journal by itself: wherever that Jira project's keys already live, or into the default project.

The token is entered once and kept in the Windows Credential Manager. Sync runs in the background, every 15 minutes by default, and on F5.

Telegram fills the journal for you

HLT 2 reads Telegram under your own account, the way a regular client does, and turns the conversation into records:

• Meetings from a calendar bot land on their day with time and duration. The bot deletes a meeting and the record is cancelled; it moves one and the record follows.
• Inbox channel: forward any message to your own channel and a note appears with its text and a link back to the original.
• Files in chats that match the review masks (.mb, .ma and .fbx by default) become review records on the day and at the time they were sent. A mask can be added later too - .zip, say: the chats are read again over the last 30 days, and reviews you deleted do not come back.

The Telegram sign-in and keys are stored next to the program, encrypted by Windows (DPAPI) for your account.

Overview: "how is it going?" answered

The screen for the morning and the minute before a call. On the left: what is in progress, what not to forget, and what is coming up. Below: where the day went, every record with a bar of its minutes. The last three days with records are ready as text - Copy puts a day on the clipboard for a chat or a stand-up, Copy the week takes the whole week with its total. A line reads like this: "✓ GLM-168 Polish Wren's attacks after game design feedback".

Further down is the month in hours: time recorded against working time, the share eaten by meetings, how many weekdays have no records at all, and a chart by day.

Work: the day by the hour, and the week

The chosen day on an hour scale, in lanes: tasks, reviews, meetings, notes. Drag a block to another time, pull its right edge to change the duration, Ctrl+wheel to zoom into the hours. Holes - working time with nothing recorded - are tinted red, and a double-click in one adds a record that fills it exactly.

Underneath is the whole week, each record a chip; drop a chip into another column and the record moves to that day. Click a record and the panel on the right shows everything about it, its links and the issue history.

A report for the week and the month

The third screen is Report: week + month, key 3. A week collects small work and serious work alike; only what you pick goes in here. Right-click a record → "Add to report…" or press R, and add a comment if you like: what was done and why it matters.

• Week - the picked records by day, with their comments.
• Month - the same picks grouped by week; the arrows step through months.
• Copy - the report as text, ready for a chat, Jira or an e-mail.
• Save .docx or .txt - as a file.

Comments can be edited on any day, and a Jira or Telegram sync never overwrites them.

Tails, rescheduling and reminders

Tails is everything still open, except meetings, in one list: search by words, filter by kind and age, close a record or take it into today's work, close everything found in one go.

Postpone to carries a record over to another day. It is smart about time: if hours were already spent, they stay on the day they were spent, and an open continuation moves to the new day.

Remind me in goes from a week to a year, with the date shown right in the menu. A reminder waits under Ahead, and on its day it pops up as a message from the tray.

The reminders timeline puts every reminder and postponed record of the project on one strip: right-click the day timeline → Reminders. Its columns are only the days that have something on them, so even a hundred reminders over a year fit on one strip; the lanes are the day's lanes. Anything past its day and still open is red, so the one you forgot is the first thing you see.

Lives in the tray, travels with its folder

The close button hides the window in the tray while the program keeps syncing and reminding. One tick in Settings starts HLT 2 with Windows, straight into the tray. Launching it again does not open a second copy - it brings up the window that is already running. Journals (.hlt2) show the program's icon in Explorer, and a double click opens one, even while HLT 2 sits in the tray.

The journal is a single .hlt2 file wherever you created it. It saves itself after every edit, and the previous version is set aside as a backup - the last twenty sit next to the journal. Settings live in settings.json next to the program and move with its folder.

Help → Check for updates opens the page with the versions of HLT 2. There is one program folder for every version - HLT2: to update, delete everything in it except settings.json and secrets, and unzip the new archive into the same place - your settings and the Telegram sign-in stay.

A tutorial and a tutorial project

You can start without connecting anything of your own. Help → Tutorial project Glowmire opens a made-up journal: two months of an animator's work on an invented game - dailies and planning, tasks with keys, review files, notes, rescheduled work, reminders and report marks. Its last day is always today, so every screen looks alive: click, drag, close tails - nothing real is touched. Jira and Telegram write nothing into it.

Help → Tutorial for beginners is a step-by-step lesson with pictures and numbered callouts for every button: unzip and run, walk through the screens of the tutorial project with small exercises, create your own journal, make a Jira token, get the keys at my.telegram.org, sign in to Telegram and live through your first working day. The tutorial comes in English and Russian, and the tutorial project itself lies in the demo folder next to the program and opens with a double click.

What it does not do

• It does not go online on its own. It talks only to your Jira and to Telegram, and only if you connect them. Without them HLT 2 is a plain manual journal.
• It does not log time to Jira. It only reads your worklogs; colleagues' worklogs never reach your journal.
• It does not fit every Jira. It is built for self-hosted Jira (Server / Data Center) with a personal access token.
• It does not understand every calendar bot. Meetings are read from one message format; other bots' messages are skipped.
• It cannot do without your Telegram account. You need an api_id and api_hash from my.telegram.org - issued once, free of charge.
• It does not carry secrets across. On another computer or another Windows user you sign in to Telegram and enter the Jira token again - by design.
• It does not download files. Pictures and documents stay in Telegram; the journal keeps a link.
• There is no Ctrl+Z. That is why deleting a record asks first, and why backups of the journal sit next to it.
• It is not code-signed. On first launch Windows may warn about an unknown publisher.

At a glance

• System: Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
• Format: a folder with HLT2.exe, no installer
• Size: HLT2-2.0.3.zip, 58 MB
• Languages: English and Russian - interface and manual, switched without a restart
• To start with: the Glowmire tutorial project and a step-by-step tutorial, right in the Help menu
• Works with: Jira Server / Data Center (personal access token) and Telegram; both are optional
• Licence: free, all rights reserved by the author
• Install: unzip into a folder you can write to (not Program Files) and run HLT2.exe
• Version: 2.0.3, the build number is in Help → About HLT 2